Forest Service Proposes New Restrictions for Sierra Nevada Back Country

After years of being pelted with brickbats over its management of some of the most popular wilderness areas in the nation, the U.S. Forest Service is proposing new restrictions on commercial pack operations and high-country backpacking in portions of the Sierra Nevada.

It is the agency’s second try at devising a blueprint for use of more than 800,000 acres in the John Muir, Ansel Adams and Dinkey Lakes wilderness areas, including Mt. Whitney.

Its first effort was universally lambasted. The revised proposal, under public review for the last three months, has been more favorably received but still has drawn criticism.

Some commercial packers, who lead tourists on horseback through the wilderness, contend the plan could jeopardize their survival, while some backpackers grumble that they are being treated unfairly.

In drawing up the plan, the forest service has embarked on the difficult task of trying to satisfy competing notions of what a wilderness experience should be. It is a debate that has polarized back-country users and sparked anger and lawsuits.

“I think we just want to get to a point where we have a plan and we live with it,” said Mary Beth Hennessy, who led the effort to draft the latest proposal. “Nobody is going to be perfectly happy.”

In a revised environmental impact statement released in August, the forest service outlined four alternative management schemes, recommending that the first one be adopted. The agency will issue a final decision next spring, after reviewing public comments.

The proposal favored by the forest service includes some major changes. It would, for the first time, place daily trail limits on the number of people commercial outfitters can take into the back country. It would also lower the overall cap on commercial use by decreasing the number of service days allocated to outfitters.

Trail quotas on the number of number of noncommercial, overnight backpackers would, in many cases, be reduced. The number of day hikers permitted up the Mt. Whitney trail would drop from 150 to 100 a day, but the number of overnight permits issued for the mountain would increase from 50 to 75 a day.

Other rule changes would ban campfires above 10,400 feet and move about 80 campsites to avoid environmental damage to streams and lakes.

Even though the plan reduces commercial service days and many backpacker trail quotas, the forest service says the new limits would essentially freeze use at current levels.

That is because many of the backpacker quotas are often not filled and the commercial pack operators are not using all the service days allocated to them.

But pack operators, who have a long history on the Sierra’s dusty trails, complain that they have been going through a slow period in recent years. Capping them at current use would thus place painful--and perhaps fatal--limits on their growth, they contend.

Further, packers argue that individual trail quotas would seriously hurt business.

For example, Bobby Tanner, co-owner of Red’s Meadow Pack Station near Mammoth Lakes, said that on a busy summer day his teams might take 50 people up one trail in the Ansel Adams Wilderness. Under the forest service proposal, commercial outfitters could take only five people a day up that trail.

At the same time outfitters are complaining about the new plan, backpacking enthusiasts grumble that it favors commercial packers and will keep hikers off some trails.

“I think you’ll see [backpacker] use go down significantly,” said Gary Guenther, a former forest service wilderness ranger and co-chairman of the eastern Sierra chapter of Wilderness Watch. “You don’t fill quotas midweek.”

Along with two other groups, Wilderness Watch filed a lawsuit against the forest service last spring, claiming that under its current, two-decade-old management plan, the agency is not adequately controlling commercial use on Sierra wilderness lands.

The lawsuit kicked up hostilities between commercial outfitters and backpackers that both sides had attempted to dampen in recent years.

“You have a lot of users who feel everybody else is the problem,” observed Allan Pietrasanta, a former mountain guide and business owner in Bishop who is among those trying to reconcile the two camps.

“The way we’re operating now isn’t working,” he said. “There’s a lot of conflict.”

Despite criticism of the latest management proposal, many see it as an improvement over the first one, released in late 1997.

Guenther said he was encouraged by the campfire ban at higher elevations.

Sally Miller, the Wilderness Society’s regional conservation representative, said that overall, she favored the proposed commercial and backpacker limits, although she felt the Mt. Whitney quota should be further reduced.

She also expressed concern about the proposal’s division of the wilderness areas into three management categories calling for different levels of use. “We think there should be consistently high standards for protecting the resource throughout the wilderness,” Miller said.

Overall, visits to the wildernesses have declined dramatically since their peak in the mid 1970s, when the Ansel Adams and John Muir areas annually recorded 1.4 million visitor days. By 1996, that figure had fallen to fewer than 600,000.

Some of that decline is the result of aging baby boomers’ waning interest in rigorous backpacking trips. Quotas imposed in response to the 1970s explosion in visitation also drove down the number of backpackers, Guenther said.

Citing the big drop, Jennifer Roeser of McGee Creek Pack Station questioned why additional limits are now necessary.

“They’ve overstepped their authority by imposing all these unnecessary and restrictive regulations and done so to the detriment of packers,” she said.

The forest service says the Sierra wilderness was too popular for its own good in the 1970s.

“If you talk to most people, the use levels at the peak were probably too high and there were some unacceptable things happening,” said Inyo National Forest planner Glen Stein. “Most people would say resource conditions have improved in the last 20 years as numbers have gone down.”

In the last three months, Stein said, the forest service has received 1,800 comments on the revised management proposal and is considering some changes.

“They’re causing us to look at a number of things,” he said.

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Packing It In

The U.S. Forest Service is a proposing new restrictions on backpacking and commercial pack operations for more than 800,000 acres in the John Muir, Ansel Adams and Dinkey Lakes federal wilderness areas in the Sierra Nevada.